What the meta tag checker looks at
Meta tags are the part of a page people rarely see but search engines and social sites read first. The checker loads your page as a crawler would and pulls out:
- Search tags: the
<title>, meta description, canonical link and robots directives, plus the language, viewport and main heading. - Social tags: Open Graph (
og:title,og:description,og:image,og:url) and Twitter card tags, which decide how a link looks when it's shared in a feed or a chat. - A social card preview built from those tags, using the same fallbacks most sites use when a tag is missing.
- A list of fixes, ordered by how much they matter: blocked from indexing first, then missing or overlong tags, then smaller suggestions.
How to use it
- Paste the full URL of the page, like your homepage or a launch announcement.
- Press Check meta tags and read the list of fixes from the top.
- After you change your tags, run the check again. Social sites cache cards, so a site may keep showing the old one for a while; most have a tool to refresh their copy.
Good lengths for titles and descriptions
Google measures titles in pixels rather than characters, but roughly 50 to 60 characters fits on most screens. Put the words people search for near the start and your brand at the end.
Meta descriptions don't affect ranking directly, but they're often shown as the snippet under your title, so they decide whether someone clicks. Aim for 120 to 160 characters that say what the page offers and who it's for.
For the social card image, use an absolute URL to a picture at least 1200 × 630 pixels, with anything important kept away from the edges, since each site crops a little differently.
Frequently asked questions
- Why doesn't my social card show an image?
- Usually the og:image tag is missing, uses a relative URL, or points to an image the social site can't download (too large, behind a login or blocked by robots.txt). Use an absolute https URL to a public image of about 1200 × 630 pixels.
- My page has the right tags in the browser. Why does the checker say they're missing?
- The tags are probably added by JavaScript after the page loads. Social sites and many crawlers only read the HTML the server sends, so render your meta tags on the server.
- What does the canonical tag do?
- It tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page, so copies with tracking parameters or different paths are grouped together. Most pages should have a canonical that points to themselves.
- What's the difference between Open Graph and Twitter tags?
- Open Graph tags (og:*) were created by Facebook and are now read by most social sites and chat apps. Twitter card tags (twitter:*) are read by X, which falls back to Open Graph when they're missing. Setting twitter:card to summary_large_image gets the big image layout.
- Does a meta description help my page rank?
- Not directly. Google doesn't use it as a ranking signal, but it often shows it as the snippet in results, and a clear description gets more clicks. Google may rewrite it if it doesn't match the search.
- Is the page I check stored anywhere?
- No. The page is fetched once to run the check and isn't saved. Each visitor can run a limited number of checks per minute.